appliedPricing presentation and choice architecture5 min read

How pricing pages shape choice, and how to present price fairly

Every pricing page nudges. What you decide is whether the nudge helps people pick the plan that suits them or the one that suits you.

What you'll be able to doRecognise anchoring, defaults, decoys and choice overload on a pricing page, judge pricing tests on plan mix and what happens after the sale, and spot drip pricing and pre-ticked add-ons before they ship.

Pricing page test ideas tend to arrive in a familiar set. Add a fourth tier. Put a “most popular” badge on the middle plan. Preselect annual billing. Show the plans from most expensive to cheapest. Each of these will change what people choose, which is why they get proposed, and each can be done in a way that helps customers or in a way that works against them.

There’s no neutral pricing page. Something has to be shown first, something has to be selected by default, and you have to decide how many options to offer. So the useful question about any pricing test is whether the change helps people pick the plan that suits them.

Anchoring

The first number someone sees affects how they judge the numbers that follow. Tversky and Kahneman described this in 1974, and it’s one of the better established effects in the field. On a pricing page it means a visitor who sees a £400 plan first will read a £90 plan differently from one who sees a £20 plan first.

That’s fair when the anchor is a plan you sell and some customers buy. It stops being fair when the anchor is a “was” price that was never charged, or a tier that exists only to make the others look cheap.

Decoys

A decoy is an option that’s clearly worse than one of the others but not all of them. Huber, Payne and Puto showed in 1982 that adding such an option shifts choice towards the option it’s worse than. The classic pricing page version is a middle tier priced just below the top tier with far less in it, so the top tier looks like the obvious deal.

The check here is simple enough to ask in a meeting. Would we be happy if a customer bought the decoy? If the answer is no, and the plan exists only to steer people elsewhere, you’re designing for confusion. If it’s a real plan that suits some customers, its effect on the others is a side effect you can live with.

Defaults

People tend to stick with whatever is already selected. Johnson and Goldstein’s 2003 paper on organ donation showed how much difference a default makes, comparing countries where people had to opt in with countries where they had to opt out. On a pricing page, defaults include the preselected billing period, the highlighted plan and any add-ons already in the basket.

A fair default is the option most customers would choose if they thought about it, shown clearly enough that changing it is easy. Preselecting annual billing with the saving and the total charge visible can pass that test. A pre-ticked box that adds a paid extra can’t. In the UK, regulation 40 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 says a trader can’t charge an extra payment without the consumer’s express consent, and that consent can’t be inferred from someone leaving a default option unchanged, such as a pre-ticked box. The EU’s Consumer Rights Directive has the same rule in Article 22.

Choice overload

The famous study here is Iyengar and Lepper’s from 2000, where shoppers offered six jams were more likely to buy than shoppers offered twenty-four. It gets quoted as proof that fewer options always convert better. The wider evidence is less tidy. A 2010 meta-analysis by Scheibehenne, Greifeneder and Todd pooled 50 experiments and found an average effect of virtually zero, with a lot of variation between studies.

So don’t assume that cutting a tier will win. What usually makes a pricing page hard is that people can’t tell the plans apart, because the differences are buried in a long feature table written in internal language. Making the difference between plans obvious is often a better test than changing how many there are.

Presenting price fairly

The price on the page should be the price people pay. Drip pricing, where mandatory charges are added as someone moves through the purchase, is the shadow version, and it costs you anyway. In Baymard’s survey of US shoppers, extra costs being too high was the most common reason given for abandoning a checkout, at 40%, and 12% cited not being able to see the total upfront.

Regulators treat it as a problem in its own right. The CMA’s price transparency guidance under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 deals directly with drip pricing, and the expectation is that unavoidable fees are included in the price you show. In the US, the FTC’s 2024 fees rule requires the total price including mandatory charges for live-event tickets and short-term lodging. Get advice on your own case, but if a fee can’t be avoided, it belongs in the headline price.

What to look for in a result

Pricing tests need more than a conversion rate. Look at the mix of plans chosen and at revenue per visitor, because a test can raise sign-ups while moving people onto cheaper plans, or raise revenue by moving people onto plans they’ll downgrade from. Set guardrail metrics for refunds, downgrades, cancellations and support contacts in the first billing cycle. A spike in tickets saying “I didn’t mean to pay annually” is the default telling you it went too far.

When an agency brings a pricing test, ask what each plan is for, which option will be selected by default and why, whether the total at checkout matches the page, and which metric will show whether customers ended up on the right plan rather than the most expensive one.

Put it to work

Take your pricing page and write down, for each plan, what it's there to do. Then note what's selected by default, which number a visitor sees first, and whether the price on the page matches what they'll pay at the end.

There is no right answer. Write yours first, then compare.

Sources

Shoshin is written by Another Web is Possible. Lessons are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.Our promise.